The length of his previous relationship, I realised.
Then I saw that, the whole time we’d been dating, all the truth had been trapped in blocks of unspoken words.
He asked me to let the flight class know he would miss them. ‘Wish them luck with . . .’ he began, but he couldn’t be bothered with a joke, or maybe he couldn’t come up with one.
24.
Oscar reached into his shoe, grasped the tongue and tugged on it. It came away in his hand. I startled, looking at the tongue of the shoe, wrenched out, torn out, here in the open air.
Oscar seemed unsurprised.
‘Here’s this thing,’ he said, tossing it aside.
25.
The final session of Flight School took place the following Tuesday.
We peered through sunset-gold-pink windows, but Wilbur cleared his throat and we turned to look at him. He wore a threadbare grey sweater today, and he tugged at the neckline so we could see his collarbone. The skin there was sun-darkened.
‘Antony telephoned me yesterday,’ he began, even-voiced. ‘He says he’s very sorry and he’ll miss us all, but he won’t be coming anymore.’
I told them that Niall was moving to Brisbane, and had also asked me to say he’d miss them.
‘Oh, he’s going to Brisbane!’ Nicole exclaimed. ‘I was thinking that . . .’ She paused, surprised by herself, and then carried on. ‘I was thinking that you and Niall might get together, Abi.’
I was pleased with her. It meant Niall’s interest in me had been visible, palpable, and therefore that Niall had, in some small way, existed. It also meant I could refer to our relationship.
‘Well, actually,’ I said, ‘we’ve been seeing each other for the last few months.’
Everybody seemed so delighted to hear this that I had to correct myself quickly. ‘But not anymore,’ I said. ‘He’s moving to Brisbane.’
‘Oh.’ They drooped. ‘So you’ve broken up?’
‘Was it serious?’ Nicole asked.
I considered. ‘In a way,’ I decided. ‘This is going to sound stupid, but the first time I saw Niall, on the weekend retreat, I felt like I knew him already. And Niall said he thought that too. So, it kind of seemed like we were meant to be.’
‘And now he’s gone,’ Frangipani murmured.
‘Secret romance!’ Nicole said, trying to rally the mood.
Now Pete Aldridge and Frangipani glanced at each other and Pete declared, gruffly, that he and Sasha had started seeing each other. They were about to spend six months driving around Australia in Pete’s campervan. So they’d have to quit flight classes too, he said apologetically.
‘Seeing each other!’ Nicole and I said in unison.
Pete had signed up for the same online dating service as Frangipani, it turned out, tracked her down and sent her a kiss.
‘That’s how you indicate interest in someone,’ Frangipani clarified.
‘A virtual kiss,’ Pete agreed, frowning to show the gravity of a virtual kiss. ‘I took down my profile the moment she agreed to a date.’
We demanded more details and they seemed pleased by the attention at first, and then irritated, so we stopped and turned back to the windows.
It was like falling dominoes, because next thing Nicole announced that she too would not be coming anymore. She went on to explain, surprising us—although afterwards I realised it made sense—that she’d been in crisis this last year. Questioning her life, her marriage, asking herself how she’d ended up in this house with four children, this husband with his accent and so on.
‘I think a Polish accent would be great!’ Frangipani chimed in. ‘I’d love a guy with a Polish accent!’
Pete Aldridge sighed stoically.
Nicole said she loved her husband’s accent, it was just this weird thing she’d been doing where she was seeing her life through a haze and she didn’t get it, none of it made sense. She had voices in her head saying things like, Who cast the Polish dude in the husband role? and Why’s that kid obsessed with lizards?
She kept comparing this to the life offered to her by the fortune teller, the one with the goats.
‘That’s why I went on that retreat,’ she said, ‘and came to these classes. To take a side swipe at my life.’
We all nodded, almost understanding.
Wilbur was smiling at her; we all were, I guess.
‘Anyway, the other night,’ Nicole continued, ‘I dreamed that the ceiling of my room was swarming with insects. They kept swooping down, biting and stinging, and I was going Ow! Ow! Ow! Until I screamed: STOP IT! I must have screamed in my sleep because Marcin was sitting up beside me in bed. Stop what? he asked.’
‘In his accent,’ Frangipani put in.
‘Yes, he was using his accent. And he said, Stop what? And I told him my dream and he praised me for shouting, Stop it! And he kissed my forehead right here—’ she pointed to the centre of her forehead ‘—and we lay down and went back to sleep. And the next day I woke up and felt like I’d come back from somewhere, like I was sinking slowly back into my life.’
Nicole scratched her wrist. ‘I could have another crisis,’ she admitted. ‘I mean, he could easily do everything wrong in another situation. But I love my husband, my children, my work, and I don’t want to raise goats. I have no interest in them.’
We all agreed vigorously that a life raising goats was not for us, and congratulated Nicole on her breakthrough.
Now they turned to me, and there I was in the fading golden light, the spotlight, everybody asking: ‘What about you, Abigail?’
Wilbur was perfectly still, watching me.
‘I think I’ll stop too,’ I said. ‘If that’s okay, Wilbur?’
Wilbur’s face was inscrutable, sad, soft, lovely, kind. It seemed to surge with something for a moment then relaxed.
‘Of course,’ he said, and smiled.
And that was the end of Flight School.
part
13
1.
Except that I ran back.
I was almost at my car when I pivoted, sprinted back and pressed the doorbell.
Wilbur opened his apartment door, looking interested.
‘You missed three!’ I cried.
He startled, but then raised an eyebrow. ‘Three?’ And he stepped aside to let me in.
In the living room, music played on the stereo, the lights were dim. Armchairs still stood in their circle, but the coffee table had been cleared, except for a single glass of red.
‘You missed three,’ I repeated.
‘Yes, you said. What did I miss? You want to sit down?’
I noted that he was not the kind of person who rises up, claws out: I did not! I did not even miss one!
He was the kind of person who enquired politely what he’d missed.
‘I don’t mean you missed three.’
‘That’s a relief.’
‘When we went to the island retreat,’ I explained, ‘someone put a note under my door that said, You missed three. It was never followed up.’
Wilbur nodded, understanding. ‘Would you like a drink?’
I shook my head, impatient for an answer.
‘Remember we were supposed to write reflections each year,’ Wilbur began, ‘and send them to The Guidebook?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, you missed three, Abi. You did them every year, except three. I was supposed to check how many years everyone missed, and put notes under their doors. Some people had missed most. Sasha missed none.’
‘Of course,’ I murmured and then, because I have a competitive streak, I told him that I had written reflections every year! Like Sasha, I’d missed none. But three I’d never mailed in: the first because I got distracted by my brother going missing, the second because I thought we might find him, and the third because my marriage broke up. But I sent all the others in. ‘Are you saying,’ I finished, suddenly mortified, ‘that you have those reflections? You’ve . . . read them?’
‘No!’ he said. ‘God, n
o. They’re sealed in envelopes. Are you sure you don’t want something to drink? Also, I made a banana treacle cake for tonight, but I never brought it out, with everything going on.’
I looked at the windows. It had started to rain.
‘Maybe I should wait until that stops,’ I decided.
Wilbur disappeared to the kitchen. I texted Dad that I was running late. He sent back a smiley face, which I found disconcerting. What was smiley-faced about me running late?
‘How about Pete Aldridge and Sasha?’ I said, once Wilbur was back with cake and cream, coffee in a pot and mugs.
Wilbur nodded. ‘I tried to be smooth and teacherly, but I practically needed to lie down.’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘Niall always thought Pete did this course so he could hit on Sasha.’
‘I thought Pete did the course to stop me throwing you all off a cliff.’
I laughed. The cake was warm. It sent a shiver right through me.
‘But why the notes under the door anyway?’ I asked. ‘Was it meant as a reprimand?’
‘It was going to come up in a class on letting go,’ Wilbur explained. He tilted his wineglass this way and that, and replaced it on the table. ‘We were going to burn all the reflections we’d written. Letting go of our misconceptions and troubled times, see.’
A crumb of cake jammed in my throat. Wilbur offered me water.
He was smiling, but it occurred to me that there was nothing left to say. ‘I might see you around my neighbourhood,’ I suggested, ‘when you’re visiting your girlfriend.’
‘Oh.’ Wilbur shook his head. ‘We broke up. Recently.’
He told me about the turquoise girlfriend. Her name was Danika, which made my lip curl. (But I was being unfair to Danika, based on the colour of her jacket, and uncurled it.) He’d been seeing her for the last couple of years, he said, and it had been magic at first, but then his parents had died and things with Danika began to unravel.
‘She was wonderful about my parents,’ he said, ‘but when I found the material about The Guidebook, well . . .’
‘She didn’t think you should run the course?’
‘She understood why it was important to me, but she was strongly opposed to me doing it.’
‘So she didn’t understand.’
‘No, she did. She thought my wanting to do it was an expression of my grief and bewilderment.’
‘What’s wrong with expressing your grief and bewilderment?’
‘I wanted to follow their instructions step by step, untangling it as I went along. But Danika said that was the wrong way to grieve. She said I should acknowledge that my parents must have been unhinged, confront what that meant for me, and then let go of it.’
At this point I curled my lip at Danika with abandon. ‘Who is she to be telling you the right way to grieve! You can grieve however you like, Wilbur! There’s no right way!’
I surprised myself then, by telling him about my own complicated relationship with grief: how I’d never been allowed to grieve properly for the people I’d lost. First, my brother went missing, but I couldn’t grieve for him because he might be coming back.
‘I thought his disappearance was connected with The Guidebook,’ I admitted, ‘since he vanished the same year The Guidebook started arriving. That’s the real reason I went on the retreat, and even why I started coming here—I thought the truth might mean the truth about Robert. About why he went, and where, and how he died . . . I know he’s dead.’ I paused.
‘Oh, Abigail,’ Wilbur said quietly.
‘And when my marriage broke up, I’d lost the love of my life. If he’d died, people would have been coming around, sharing memories and bringing casseroles, but he’d had an affair, so I wasn’t allowed to be fond and misty about him. If I was, I wasn’t confronting the truth. And I wasn’t allowed to be angry. That was being bitter. And I wasn’t allowed to miss him, because I’d never actually had him, and . . .’
I might have carried on, but Wilbur was listening with such compassion on his face that I almost burst into tears.
‘Now I’m denying your right to grieve,’ I told him, ashamed, ‘by going on about myself. My point is, you should grieve the way you want.’
‘Thank you.’ He smiled warmly. ‘But to be fair to Danika, she was only trying to think of what was best for me.’
‘Oh, Danika,’ I said, exasperated.
Wilbur tipped back his wineglass, hiding his face, so I couldn’t see if he was annoyed or if that was a glint in his eye.
‘So,’ he continued, ‘I had to cancel classes sometimes because Danika kept arranging things for Tuesday nights, getting tickets to shows. She sent texts during our classes, trying to distract me. In the end, she gave me an ultimatum: her or the class. And I . . . chose the class.’
‘But now the class is over!’
Wilbur smiled. ‘It was the right choice for Danika and me.’
There was a rain-falling, music-playing quiet.
‘The funniest thing,’ Wilbur said eventually. I was looking at the windows, and thought he must be eating cake. I assumed he would take up the sentence again in his own time.
But the quiet had returned.
‘The funniest thing?’ I prompted, turning back, and then I saw that he was going to cry. He was trying to get hold of his facial muscles to prevent this.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Just, the funniest thing.’ And there it was again: the silence.
I pushed my chair closer, ready to—could you hug your flight instructor?
‘Can I tell you something?’ he tried, coming at it fresh. ‘I know this was a dream or false memory, but the funniest thing is, I once saw my parents fly.’
He had taken control of his tears now. He looked at me steadily.
‘You did?’ I faltered.
‘I was small, maybe four or five, and I woke in the night and looked outside. There was the streetlight and the letterbox, a car parked beside it. The eucalyptus tree with branches that opened around an electrical wire. And just above this wire were my parents. Holding hands. Hovering in the air.’
I laughed. He did too.
‘It was a dream or my imagination,’ he said. ‘Maybe I overheard my parents talking about flying and so I constructed the image? Or it was two images, superimposed—my parents were probably out the front holding hands, and my four-year-old mind positioned them in the sky.’ He looked at me carefully. ‘I know that my parents never hovered above electrical wires. I never mentioned this in class because, well, Pete Aldridge would have pounded me—but I also think a part of me wanted the memory to be true.’
I studied his smile and I saw that two unstable people had built a gossamer house and left it to their son, who had got to work plastering the walls with his own loss. These classes had been built on bewilderment: our own, Wilbur’s parents, Wilbur’s.
‘Because otherwise,’ Wilbur continued, ‘I had to admit that they were insane.’
At this point, he began to cry properly, and I stood up and put my arms around him. I could feel the bones in his shoulders, the scratchiness of his chin against my chest.
He stopped fast and apologised.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Never apologise for crying. I feel honoured that you cried.’
He looked a bit grim and uncertain about that.
‘I figured something out,’ I said, and Wilbur wiped his eyes, surreptitiously almost. Now you couldn’t tell he’d been crying at all.
‘I don’t believe your parents were insane,’ I pronounced. ‘I believe they were writing a self-help book. Flight really was a metaphor. Think about it. We had to—to follow the path into flight, to lose ourselves in the fantasy. That final class about letting go, wasn’t that the point? Your parents were offering their own unique route to the . . . flight of the human spirit?’
Wilbur raised an eyebrow. I could tell he was unconvinced, but tentatively pleased with my theory.
‘Seriously,’ I said. ‘I think that’s exactly it!’
&n
bsp; The quiet now had a deeper quality, with occasional drips in it, and I looked at the windows.
‘Has the rain stopped?’
Wilbur peered out, like somebody looking for flight waves.
I picked up my handbag. I was preparing a new speech—one in which I thanked him, not only for the cake and coffee, but for all the Tuesdays, because they had been something special, and he must never listen to Danika, he must—
‘But you probably had seen him before!’ Wilbur said suddenly.
I blinked.
‘Niall! When you met, you felt like you’d seen each other before. You probably had, when you were teenagers.’
‘What?’
‘Do you know how my parents got all your names and addresses? Through me. They wanted teenagers, but strangers, not my friends. So they enrolled me in holiday courses and camps, drama and hiking, that kind of thing, with other teenagers. Then they got the enrolment details—my dad could be charming, my mother could lie beautifully. You and Niall were in one of those courses, probably the same one!’
I found this unlikely. I never did any holiday courses or camps.
‘Creative writing,’ Wilbur said, snapping his fingers. ‘Workshop for Young Writers.’
‘I did do that course,’ I whispered. ‘With my brother. You were there too?’
He nodded. ‘We had to say our favourite foods and I said that it depended on the ocean. I thought I could impress girls by being enigmatic. Niall was in that class too, but he signed up under the name River.’
‘River!’ I yelled. ‘I remember him! I liked him! His favourite food was Special Fried Rice!’
Wilbur sighed. ‘Some boys figure things out sooner than others.’
But River? Why River? ‘Niall said he used to call himself movie star names,’ I recalled. ‘River Phoenix!’
That’s why I knew Niall. He wasn’t the kind of boy I liked, he was the boy I had liked!
A blaze of excitement abruptly dwindled. My intuition that Niall was the guy was not the universe, nor fate. It was prosaic, easily explained.
‘Well,’ I said—and then one last accusation. ‘You also promised snow.’
Gravity Is the Thing Page 32